Dear District Attorney Funk,
People shouldn’t be stuck in jail because they’re poor. Yet right now, there are hundreds of people in our city’s jails who are there simply because they don’t have enough money to buy their freedom. Imagine that — it’s 2018 in America and you have to buy your freedom.
It might be easy to dismiss the plight of these Nashvillians because they’ve been accused of crimes. It may be easy to stay the course and to not risk controversy. After all, as an elected official charged with keeping us safe, being “tough on crime” is the easiest path to take, and what says toughness better than locking up criminals, right?
I want to give you another choice — a choice that makes our community safer, makes our community stronger, and is a choice that is simultaneously both fiscally responsible and morally right. We deserve justice in our city, our cash bail system is deeply unjust, and you should end it as soon as possible.
Our city’s cash bail system is unjust first and foremost because it’s not really “our system.” You are in fact the head of two very different criminal justice systems in our city, one for the those with money, and one for those without it. That difference, that separate and very unequal setup, means that the consequences of an arrest are drastically different depending on which system you can afford to be a part of.
If you can’t afford bail, you risk losing your job, custody of your kids, and your connection to the community. People accused of even non-violent crimes receive a more severe punishment just by being held in jail than they would if they were tried, convicted, and sentenced immediately. Even those wrongfully accused, who in fact committed no crime at all, suffer these strict punishments. And it’s all because they don’t have enough green pieces of paper in their wallet.
It doesn’t have to be this way. You have the power to move our city toward one fair, equal, moral criminal justice system that works for everyone. Nashvillians want to lead, but we shouldn’t be afraid to follow the examples of New Jersey, California, and Philadelphia by creating a risk-based, community-powered bail system that allows communities to care for their people while at the same time freeing the city from the costs of pretrial incarceration in most cases.
I urge you to work with expert reformers like Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner as well as local activists like Rahim Buford and the Nashville Community Bail Fund. The practical steps for building a better system are as clear as the moral case for reform. Don’t let one more husband, wife, sister or neighbor sit in a Nashville jail tonight and be convicted of the crime of being poor.
Adam Dunn, Nashville, Tennessee
